Friday, November 13 — 12:00 noon — WAG 316
Josh Roebke, University of Texas Institute for Historical Studies
“Color Television and Gray Flannel Suits: Ernest Lawrence and the Entertainment Industry in the Early Years of the Cold War”
In 1958, David Lilienthal called Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez, “Madison-avenue-type scientists. Scientists in gray flannel suits.” Lilienthal was referring to the advertising that these physicists did for the hydrogen bomb, but he could have also been describing their recent business experience. In March of 1950, Ernest Lawrence founded Chromatic Television Laboratories, Inc., and a few weeks later he sold a half stake to Paramount Pictures for $1 million. While Paramount developed into a consumer electronics conglomerate, Lawrence and his employees from the Radiation Lab in Berkeley, including the future Nobel Laureates Luis Alvarez and Edwin McMillan, developed a cathode-ray tube for color television named the chromatron. Throughout the 1950s, Ernest Lawrence thus attended to dueling passions: hydrogen bombs and color televisions. Although his commitment to the first was attributed to patriotism and his interest in the second has been dismissed as a hobby, it is not so easy to disentangle his motives. Lawrence worked with the same physicists and engineers on both projects. And color screens were needed for more than variety shows and sitcoms; they also displayed incoming missiles and airplanes in vivid color. Several Nobel Laureates have founded successful businesses. But no company has been led by three future Nobel Laureates and been such a failure as Chromatic Television Laboratories. The chromatron resisted mass-production for more than a decade, and Lawrence divested all interest in his company shortly before he died. Yet Lawrence still had a profound influence on the development of color television. In 1961, the Sony Corporation licensed the chromatron, and by the end of that decade Japanese engineers had developed a native version of Lawrence’s tube, called the Trinitron system. Sony would soon dominate the US market for consumer electronics, thanks in part to its patient refinement of Ernest Lawrence’s technology.
———————
Joshua Roebke is currently writing his first book, The Invisible World, a social and cultural history of particle physics during the 20th century. The book will be published in the US by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and rights have been sold in a few other countries around the world. He has a Master’s Degree in theoretical high-energy physics, and he was an editor and writer at an award-winning science magazine for several years. One of his features was included in The Best American Science and Nature Writing. He was a visiting scholar in the history of science at UC Berkeley, and he is currently a research associate at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also teaches writing.